Blog - Page 64
A collection of 2,517 blog posts
“Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee I’ve felt lucky to learn so much from being an avid reader in the past few years. I’ve come to believe that there is such immense power and knowledge contained within books. As a natural introvert, I’m a reflective person and love to read books and think about what we could try to apply at Buffer. In fact, we’re such believers in the power of reading at Buffer that all new team members (and family members
At Buffer, we’re a fully distributed team. We recently closed our office in San Francisco and now have a team in 12 different timezones. One of the frequent questions we receive is, “How do you work as a remote developer with so many timezones?” It’s such a great question and helps me reflect on some the unique aspects of working as a full-time developer at Buffer. It’s been such a fun journey working remotely for over two years now, so I’d love to dig into some of the challenges & advantages o
This post originally published on February 18, 2016. We’ve updated it here with the latest change to Twitter’s algorithm-based timeline. Over recent months, there has been a lot of debate about the future of Twitter. Growth has halted, share prices have fallen, and some are even saying #RIPTwitter. With all that in mind, the future of Twitter still feels extremely exciting, though. It feels like something big is afoot. And in order to kickstart growth and get people excited again, Twitter has
This week in #bufferchat, we were joined by Amanda Vera to explore B2B strategies for social media! We discussed how B2B social media marketing differs from B2C, the particular social media platforms that work well for B2B companies, what metrics are important to focus on, and so much more. Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, every week on Wednesdays, 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm UTC, for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and community manage
As a psychotherapist in the mental health and counseling industry and the partner of a Buffer team member , I jumped at the chance to attend Buffer’s recent retreat in Hawaii . I was curious to learn more about the world that my partner is so passionate about—this particular job has affected him so profoundly. And as my own industry is built on ideas of empathy, relationships, and human interaction, I hoped to ge
“Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open.” — Albert Einstein Einstein was right about a lot of things, but in my mind this sentiment is one of his finest discoveries (OK, the general theory of relativity is pretty good, too). Creating—building something from nothing and sharing it with the world—requires a lot of bravery. In the end, it can feel a bit like breaking yourself free. I’ve chronicled both my own idea prison and some of my attempts to free myself on the
Over 1.5 billion people regularly use Facebook. And as the social network has grown, the rate at which Facebook shares news, and releases new features and products has accelerated. It can be a little hard to keep up sometimes. With this in mind, I’d love to share 11 Facebook tips, tricks, and facts with you. This post will give you plenty of great stuff to help you get the most out of and better understand Facebook. From why you get shown certain ads and which types of posts get the most eng
How many people know your salary? Your boss, of course. Your partner, perhaps. Maybe a few friends you can trust. What if everyone knew it? And not just everyone at your company; everyone like everyone—Internet commenters. Friends of friends. People you’ve never met. This is the experience of every team member at Buffer, where we’ve been sharing our salaries with the world since 2013. And we’re not alone in breaking the salary taboo: * The startup SumAll shares employee salaries within the
A while back I read a pretty inspiring blog post, Serving Analytics the Right Way It’s a great read by Kevin Teh, a Data Scientist at OpenDoor. Like at Buffer, they also use Looker as an analytics platform. One part of the post I really liked was the idea of ‘Bringing data to the Team’. “all of the data is updated in real time without requiring an analyst to do any repetitive manual work. However, t
I’ve been fortunate to have many great mentors over the years, and as a result I try to spend a lot of time helping other founders. When Buffer was going all the way with our self-management experiment, I was meeting weekly with someone who championed this concept within her company and successfully got the team started in this direction. After several chats, Buffer hit a key phase of growth and I wasn’t able to connect with her for some months. During that same time, we were undergoing a big
Instagram has now released one of its most requested features. The ever-popular photo sharing app announced that following the release of version 7.15 for iOS and Android users will have the ability to switch between multiple accounts. This news is sure to make power users and social media managers jump with joy as managing multiple accounts for brands (or your pets) has been a time-consuming task up until now. Here’s a super-quick guide on how to add and manage multiple accounts on Instagram
Solving the challenges we face at Buffer has always brought us to some unique places. From trying many different forms of management to recovering from a serious hacking incident, we are always learning valuable lessons along the way. Recently, we just wrapped up our 7th Buffer retreat. As our distributed team from corners all around the globe prepared to meet up in Hawaii, we thought one thing that we could improve would be a way of letting everyone on the team know where things are happening
The world of paid ads can sometimes feel a little overwhelming, especially if you’re new to the game and wondering where to even start. Wouldn’t it be nice to find a nice and easy (and effective) way of dipping your toes in? I’m only a few months removed from this post exploring paid ads as a total noob, which I remain, and I’ve done my very best since to be a sponge for all the paid ads experiments and strategies I can find. We just so happened to come onto a neat one here at Buffer. It’s s
Not too long ago, our pals at Product Hunt were kind enough to ask Buffer founder Joel Gascoigne to host an “ask me anything” chat session. 10,000+ words and many dozen questions later, we wanted to share some of our favorite questions and answers with you, too. 1. Joel’s average weekday Q: What’s your average weekday like? A: These days I generally have a lot of quick meetings with different people in the team. I’m mainly focused within product/engineering, customer service, hiring and the
The Buffer team has just returned from our 7th all-team retreat in Hawaii , during which more than half of the team was meeting face-to-face for the very first time. One of our first-timers, Ross Parmly, shares this reflection of the week. Celebration has followed so much of my Buffer journey. Celebrating the moment Carolyn ‘s name showed up in my inbox for the first time. Ce
Awhile back, we were fortunate to try some neat email tactics that helped double our email list growth in just one month’s time. Then we stopped growing our list altogether. We shifted our learnings from growing an email list into growing Buffer signups. And we’ve yet to go back. Odd? Strange? Counterintuitive? Yep, probably all those things. Most online marketing advice today will advise you to build an email list, first and foremost. We aren’t. We’ve had the same amount of email subscribers
Facebook carousel ads are extremely engaging and fun way to promote your business. According to data collected by Kinetic Social, these ads can also drive up to 10 times more traffic to advertisers’ websites than static sponsored posts on Facebook. And LOVOO found that they got a 72%higher click-through rate versus single image mobile app ads. It feels clear these ads can be extremely effective, but how can you maximize their potential? In this post, we’ll walk through not just how to create a
It’s one of the biggest pieces that will make or break us as we try to become a great company, and I only recently realized it. We’ve been back and forth a number of times about the topic of feedback, and it’s an area where we still have a lot of work to do to get right. People often say, “You have this value of positivity and no complaining, and you also have a value of clarity and sharing things early. How that could those work together when it comes to giving feedback?” It’s not just those
A few years ago, my girlfriend proposed an interesting thought: How well do I really know my friends and family? My initial thought was that of course I knew these people. We all get along and things are great. I’m friendly, they’re friendly. What more is there? However, it wasn’t as simple as I thought. This simple question started a reflection over the past few years on how I really interact in my relationships. Was I really curious and deeply invested in the people who I call my family and
You’ll notice that I made the title of this post sound quite impressive (at least I hope I did!). But the great thing about this story is that anyone can have such an impressive outcome, and it’s not at all as daunting as it might sound. In fact, all these outcomes came from doing small things every day over a long period. I’m a big fan of working smarter, not harder and finding small ways to make my work more efficient. As Buffer’s first Content Crafter about two years ago, I got the chance
What is the next big wave of social media? Maybe it’s Peach—or another hot new social network. Maybe it’s a strategy like posting times or text faces. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ It’s really hard to say! (And yet here I am saying it.) ? To ride the wave of the next big thing in social media, it often takes a lot of trial-and-error, a good deal of trendspotting, and some courage to try new things. I’ve spent some time reading up on what’s to come for social media and I’d love to get your thoughts on three n
As a social media startup, Buffer is constantly learning about what it takes to build great products. Whether it’s giving a unique role to our Product Creators or evolving the structure of our teams, we try to treat everything as an experiment with opportunities to continually learn and improve. One of our more recent sources of learning has been the launch of Pablo, our social media image creation app. Building Pablo has been a unique experiment that equipped us with some great product lesson
Imagine getting off a plane in a new state or country, heading to a place you’ve never seen, to spend a week with 70-plus coworkers you’ve never met (plus some of their partners and kids). That’s what happened to more than half of the Buffer team over the weekend. This week, our fully distributed team is all in one place—Honolulu, Hawaii—for our 7th all-team retreat . We’ll spend a full we
“Could you pop into a quick morning standup, Ash?” “I’ll be there in a minute,” I’d reply. “I’m just finishing up a Facebook post.” As a community manager, most of my mornings would start along these lines. One of the toughest, and most time-consuming, tasks in community and social media management is finding a stream of high-quality, engaging content to share with your audience every day. A social media calendar is an excellent way to keep on top of this. But staring at a blank calendar can